Airdate: Collision

ABC1 airs Collision, an ITV drama that tells the story of a major road accident and a group of people who have never met, but who all share one single defining moment that will change their lives forever.

It will be the same edition which aired on PBS in only 2 episodes, edited from the original 5 hours down to three and a half hours (210 minutes).

It features Douglas Henshall, Kate Ashfield, Paul McGann, Jo Woodcock, Phil Davies, Dean Lennox Kelly, Craig Kelly, David Bamber, Zoe Telford and Lucy Griffith.
Amid the tangle of twisted metal and emotional turmoil wrought by the tragedy of a crash of this scale, are the stories of the victims, and the impact of the accident on their families, friends and colleagues.

As the terrible task of investigating the cause of the carnage begins, a series of revelations emerge, from government cover-ups and smuggling to disturbing corporate secrets and murder.

A police officer with a troubled past is brought in to investigate the shocking road traffic accident and begins to untangle the secrets and the lives of the complete strangers who are involved. As Detective Inspector John Tolin sifts through the case files, pictures of the collision and its victims, he starts to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of the events and twists of fate that led these people to be on the road at the same time. The chaotic aftermath of the collision brings more surprises.

Years of experience tell Tolin that there’s more to the collision than meets the eye. But as the mysteries pile up, he has to deal with his own complicated relationships and the tragic events in his life.

The big problem I have with this sort of thing is not that a few minutes are cut out for time (let’s face it, there aren’t too many shows that couldn’t be tightened up a bit). It’s that these things are written as episodes and by joining them together, the pacing is often completely ruined. The old omnibus editions of ‘Doctor Who’ that were popular on the ABC in the 1990s are a good example.

P.S.
I watched all 5 hours of The Deep (and enjoyed it).
Thanks for the heads up that the ABC are planning to ruin Collision too by cutting out half the story.
I’ll look elsewhere for the full 5 hours of it too.

2paw you can’t really knock repeats of Midsomer Murders when it pulls nearly 1 million people and was the highest watched program of the night after the news. Besides, not everyone has seen every episode. There are probably quite a few people like myself who have only just got into it in the last 12 months or so and wouldn’t mind seeing the earlier episodes. Just a thought.

Given that it aired in the UK on ITV, each episode would only have been 45 minutes to allow for ads. This means they only had to cut out about 15 minutes, which is probably mostly just recaps and credits. So not the wholesale cutting they did on ‘The Deep’. Although anything that made that program shorter can only be a good thing.

Apparently PBS have also re-edited the marvelous ‘Downton Abbey’ into four 90-minute episodes, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we got that version too.

They are showing the edited down version of The Deep too, not that I think anything could help there. I am disappointed that we are not getting the proper Collision programme though. It’s not as if they have new things to show: repeats of Midsomer Murders anyone??

I can’t help wondering how they could edit down a story like this from five hours to three and a half and not lose significant bits of the narrative, character development and motivation, etc. These sorts of tales usually have so many interlinked threads that when you unpick one you lose parts of the ones you keep and the whole thing suffers. Still, it sounds interesting and worth a watch.